Beethoven's Power According to Solomon

I just finished reading Maynard Solomon's meticulous, fascinating, and revealing biography of Beethoven, and I was struck by a discussion from the final chapter. In it, Solomon mentions how modern generations–particularly those following the Second World War–have turned away from works such as the Ninth Symphony, which in its unsurpassed beauty and idealism, supposedly "anaesthetizes the anguish and the terror of modern life, thereby standing in the way of a realistic perception of society." This view was immortalized in the works of serialist composers such as Pierre Boulez and in the famous plea of Adrian Leverkühn, a fictional composer in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus: "I want to to revoke the Ninth Symphony."

Solomon, however, completely rejects this position in a remarkable passage about the optimistic, life-affirming possibilities inherent in Beethoven's music:

"The fatal (and destructive) misconception underlying such attitudes is this: if we lose our awareness of the transcendent realms of play, beauty, and kinship that are portrayed in the great affirmative works of our culture, if we lose the reconciling dream of the Ninth Symphony, there may remain no counterpoise against the engulfing terrors of civilization, nothing to set against Auschwitz and Vietnam as a paradigm of humanity's potentialities. Masterpieces of art are instilled with a surplus of constantly renewable energy–an energy that provides a motive force for changes in the relations between human beings–because they contain projections of human desires and goals that have not yet been achieved (which indeed may be unrealizable). . . . The symbols of perfection (which Schiller called "the effigies of [the] ideal")–the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, the trumpet call of Fidelio, the "heiliger Dankgesang," the festal paradise of the Seventh Symphony, the Bacchic resurrection of the Eroica finale–these keep alive humanity's hopes and sustain faith in the possibilities of renewal." 

Beethoven may have been a deeply flawed person, but his music sets an impossibly high moral standard–a challenge for future generations to continually strive for the beauty and perfection that he realized through art.